Setting Up Eclipse—a Summary

This page summarizes all the pages listed below so that you do not have to pore
through them all to find what you want. This is an Eclipse start-up series I've
written and maintained as principally a web-applications developer, but it is
not generalized to all Eclipse development.

If you wish to develop in C/C++, PHP, JavaScript or other disciplines, you
may find the first two documents relevant, but not the
succeeding ones. There are some references to Android and BlackBerry
development in these pages.

I hope this will be helpful. I remember being new to Java, Eclipse, web
frameworks, etc. It was very painful. This is me giving back.

This document discusses the different versions of Eclipse, how to
download and install them. Unless you're developing on a very bizarre
platform, you don't even want to think about getting Eclipse from any
other source than eclipse.org.

Unless you're developing on a very bizarre platform, don't even think
about using anything other than the latest, working Sun Java Developers
Kit. You do not need to install it for general use on your computer host.
In fact, I advise you to download and extract a private copy just for
Eclipse's use whatever version of the JRE you decide to run on your host.

Apache Tomcat is a web server container like JBoss, Websphere, GlassFish
and others. If you're developing a web application, you will have to have
such a server. Tomcat is a good place to start. You can always switch to
use another later; there is rarely much difference beyond setting up the
container.

Peruse this document to read ramblings about how to set up and use
Eclipse for web-application development after you've performed the steps
from all the articles above. It is more of an example: it assumes you're
going to use JavaServer Faces (JSF), which you might not. However, other
frameworks often follow the pattern used here.